A health care bill banning rescission, disallowing coverage refusals due to pre-existing conditions, eliminating the wasteful Medicare Advantage program, and expanding coverage to 94% of the country seems like a step forward.
Then again, it’s a giveaway to teh evil corporations, so I’m clearly some sort of non-sentient shill. But the alternative is being complicit with murder, so hello persistent vegetative state.
I wonder if replying to emails I get at work with a Snopes link would cause problems.
In other news, you should read this. Of course, I’ve never read any Ayn Rand, so maybe I should shut up. I’ve sort of half meant to read a book of hers, in the same way that I half consider reading a Twilight book: I would feel better about considering them dreck. Alas, I have better things to do.
So Holder is going to appoint a prosecutor to investigate CIA detention abuses. Only those who acted outside the guidelines set by the Yoo and Bybee memos, though.
That largely makes sense. We can’t expect CIA interrogators to be able to spot fraudulent legal arguments, but we can expect them to follow the guidelines given to them. So, okay, I’m on board here.
But low level abuses aren’t the real problem, as everyone knows. The outrage is over the Bush administration’s conduct. It’s about lawyers who made arguments in bad faith to justify unchecked executive power. It’s about administration officials using those arguments to shield themselves from accusations of war crimes.
It’s probably too much to ask the executive branch to check itself. We have a system of checks and balances for a reason. But we have a legislative branch that is made up of people either too stupid to do their job or too corrupt. I suspect there’s a lot of both. The judicial branch is better, but it can only do so much when American citizens rarely have standing to challenge these abuses.
So in conclusion, we’re fucked. But at least we’re going to get major, progressive health care reform. Oh, wait…
I’ve had my amusement for the day: I got polled about CO2. I missed the name they gave at the beginning, then forgot to ask again, but it was pretty strange. It was essentially a bunch of questions about Carbon Dioxide. The main part was a list of “facts” about CO2 and how they changed my opinion about it. Stuff like plant life increasing because of it, it being in soft drinks, etc. It was a long string of “No opinion” answers from me, given that it’s a ridiculous premise. I don’t have positive or negative opinions of molecules (curiously, the caller’s script referred to CO2 as a element several times). There was one question that asked if CO2 was green, which I just laughed at and say “no opinion.”
In any case, this definitely seemed like “market research” designed to attack the idea of climate change. I don’t know if their approach is clever or stupid (that CEI ad was roundly mocked, but maybe it was effective). Do people really hold the opinion that CO2 is teh evil and must be eradicated? Is that a useful line of attack? CO2 is necessary, but too much causes problems for us. Holding that (correct) opinion makes it nearly impossible to answer the survey, which I think limits its usefulness.
But what do I know? My mind’s made up.
You know, the real problem with this post is that it doesn’t go far enough. I mean, what about the hospitals? They’re party to the “18,000 deaths,” right? Refusing to perform non-emergency care and all. The doctors go right along with it, too.
The insurance companies use sophisticated statistical modeling, not possible without the software industry. So they’re complicit. Microsoft sold those companies Windows licenses, so Bill Gates is responsible for some of those deaths. Hell, maybe some of the software is written in C++; damn you Bjarne Stroustrup! You’re killing people!
So, to recap: insurance companies, hospital employees, doctors, nurses, lobbyists, politicians, and software engineers. All complicit in an ongoing criminal enterprise.
Somehow, I don’t think this is a useful line of argument.
So Paul Krugman wrote a column calling climate change-deniers treasonous:
And as I watched the deniers make their arguments, I couldn’t help thinking that I was watching a form of treason — treason against the planet.
…
Still, is it fair to call climate denial a form of treason? Isn’t it politics as usual?
Yes, it is — and that’s why it’s unforgivable.
Do you remember the days when Bush administration officials claimed that terrorism posed an “existential threat” to America, a threat in whose face normal rules no longer applied? That was hyperbole — but the existential threat from climate change is all too real.
Yet the deniers are choosing, willfully, to ignore that threat, placing future generations of Americans in grave danger, simply because it’s in their political interest to pretend that there’s nothing to worry about. If that’s not betrayal, I don’t know what is.
Krugman’s statement is stupid and hyperbolic (though he has good reason to be angry). John Cole has the correct reaction, so I don’t have much to say on that.
However, Jay over at LitW said this about Krugman’s column:
Of course, not quite understanding that Krugman was turning the right-wingers’ use of the word “treason” against them – pointing out the hypocrisy of an earlier, hyperbolic use of the term for a threat that wasn’t quite all that it was made out to be, by contrasting it with the same folks’ laconic attitude towards an all-too real and present catastrophic threat – naturally the usual people went completely bath*t.
You know, this is pure bullshit. Yes, maybe we can look at some who are in an uproar and go “Ha! You’re reaping what you’ve sown.” Fuck that. Krugman knows better. And liberals should know better than to defend him with sophistry. Treason should actually mean something and not be an empty political insult the way fascism is now.
People who aspire to be more than political hacks should be able to restrain themselves.
You can almost hear this blog dying, can’t you?
Anyway, I was thinking about this post by Mark, which is post 93 in his long running anti-hope series.
Progressives like to claim the public is supportive of their agenda based on single issue polling. It seems to me that once public opinion collides with an opposition campaign, things look different. Public opinion is also contradictory. People like more services and they like lower taxes. They can’t have both. California is trying it and it’s not working. Opinion polls show that if you pay income taxes, you think you’re paying too much. So despite the fact that polls also show people will trade taxes for services, they don’t think they’re getting a good deal. That’s ripe territory for conservatives. And if we’re talking about single-payer, it’s hard to see how anything gets past “the government is taking away your health care for some brand new thing that sucks for various reasons.” Even if the various reasons themselves suck, losing your health care is scary.
That’s all obvious, isn’t it?
So single-payer organizing is pointless right now. If we get a public plan, that changes. Are we going to get a public plan? Beats me.
I’m a couple days late, but this is still worth mocking:
REID: I’m saying that the United States Senate, Democrats and Republicans, do not want terrorists to be released in the United States. That’s very clear.
QUESTION: No one’s talking about releasing them. We’re talking about putting them in prison somewhere in the United States.
REID: Can’t put them in prison unless you release them.
QUESTION: Sir, are you going to clarify that a little bit? …
REID: I can’t make it any more clear than the statement I have given to you. We will never allow terrorists to be released in the United States.
Harry Reid is so hardcore that even releasing accused terrorists so they could be moved is not acceptable. In transit they won’t be in prison, so that counts as released.
I guess.
This Pew survey about support for torture by religious affiliation is enlightening.
For a group that prides itself on values, evangelicals are the least likely to say torture is never justified, preferring the more relative “sometimes” and the awful “often” options. Mainline protestants have the fewest undecideds and the most in the “never” category and are pretty evenly split between often/sometimes and rarely/never. The unaffiliated prove themselves to be the most anti-torture (but they’re not sure about it, having a higher number of undecideds and fewer “nevers” than the mainline Protestants).
But I like the break out by church attendance. Weekly or monthly churchgoers are pretty comparable, but the bigger jump comes when you go from monthly attendance to seldom or never. I guess all that torture in the Bible goes straight to their heads.
But really, we’re a more pro-torture country that we should be, and that’s disheartening.
Matt Yglesias tries to defend using Twitter for political commentary. Is it just me, or is “blame the user, not the medium” pretty weak? No medium can make a bad commentator good, but it can certainly be ill-suited to a task. No one is tweeting investigative journalism.
Claire McCaskill claims she uses it to “drive thought and discussion.” I dare you to reconcile that with what’s there right now. There are comments about her schedule, personal comments, and approximately four comments that you could claim drive discussion. One of them is a one word comment on Specter (“Wow”) and another is a generic statement of support for Kathleen Sebelius. So I see two defensible comments. Out of twenty.
McCaskill also claim it’s a way of staying “connected.” That’s dubious and has a significant downside: her followers are more connected to her. Personally connected, given the contents of her feed. That makes them less objective when it comes to evaluating her job performance, which means she can get away with more. Maybe it’s a small effect, but being connected isn’t necessarily a plus for rational evaluation.
I don’t really care if members of Congress want to use Twitter. I have a (seldom used) Twitter account. It’s amusing. But let’s not pretend it’s a useful source of information from politicians or political commentators.
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